jrosenhouse | February 29, 2008As usual, I'm late to this particular party. Over at BayBlab, a blogger calling himself “Anonymous Coward” offers up some choice words for the all-powerful, all-consuming, resistance-is-futile ScienceBlogs combine:
If you examine the elephant in the room, ScienceBlogs, the trend is maintained: politics, religion books, technology, education and music are tagged more often than biology or genetics. This suggests that their primary motives are entertainment rather than discussing science. Why? Because it pays. Seed Magazine and the bloggers themselves profit from the traffic. That's right,…
jrosenhouse | February 26, 2008From last night's Tucker:
CARLSON: This was my 20th--literally, I think it was my 20th Oscar night in a row where I didn't watch any of it.
WOLFF: It was really bad. I don't know if it's stagflation or bad weather or whatever, but I was just not in the mood, friend. I blame stagflation.
CARLSON: Watching rich people congratulate themselves, no.
Rich people congratulating themselves. The punditocracy in a nutshell.
Oh, and more people watched the Oscars on Sunday than watch Tucker in a year.
jrosenhouse | February 24, 2008That, minus the question mark, is the title of a new article by theologian John Haught in the current issue of The Christian Century. The subtitle is “Why the New Atheism isn't Serious.” Sadly, the article does not seem to be available online.
After reading that headline, I was expecting Haught to offer a variation on The Courtier's Reply. Actually, Haught has something different in mind.
The serious atheists, in his view, are Nietzsche, Camus and Sartre. What makes them serious?
In this respect the new atheism is very much like the old secular humanism that was rebuked by the hard-…
jrosenhouse | February 24, 2008The Christian Century has this interesting article about the relationship between evolution and Christianity, written by Amy Frykholm. Interesting not because it actually resolves the question in any satisfactory way, but rather because it states the problem in a more forthright manner than is typical for writing in this genre:
But I suspect that the compatibility of evolutionary science with Christian theology is more often asserted than explored. I, for one, do most of my thinking about science out of one mental box and my thinking about religion out of another. On questions about…
jrosenhouse | February 11, 2008Finally, The Christian Century has published this lengthy report of a visit to the Creation Museum. It was written by Jason Byassee. Most of the article is a bemused and slightly cynical account of the exhibits you find at the museum. It was the last paragraph that really caught my eye, however:
Reconciling Christian claims about God, creation and humanity with the findings of Darwin and his successors is an important and daunting task, one that mainline theology has still not satisfactorily accomplished. AiG can hardly be faulted for attempting the task, though its effort is a…
jrosenhouse | February 11, 2008The Guardian series also contains this article from theology professor Richard Harries, arguing -- surprise! -- that evolution and Christian faith are compatible. Let's have a look.
Here's paragraph two:
As the Victorian novelist Charles Kingsley put it, God does not just make the world, he does something much more wonderful, he makes the world make itself. More generally, the scientist Asa Gray, a close friend of Darwin, said that there had been no undue reluctance amongst Christians in accepting Darwin's theory. So how it is that some people still think the church was opposed to evolution…
jrosenhouse | February 11, 2008In other news, the Guardian newspaper has posted a series of articles about various evolution related topics.
First up is this characteristically lucid entry from Richard Dawkins. I especially like this:
But what makes natural selection so special? A powerful idea assumes little to explain much. It does lots of explanatory "heavy lifting", while expending little in the way of assumptions or postulations. It gives you plenty of bangs for your explanatory buck. Its Explanation Ratio - what it explains, divided by what it needs to assume in order to do the explaining - is large.
If any reader…
jrosenhouse | February 11, 2008Meanwhile, over at Town Hall Dinesh D'Souza serves up yet another steaming pile of religious idiocy. His subject is an exchange between Rabbi Jacob Neusner and Pope Benedict. He opens with a gratuitous slap at Richard Dawkins:
Even so, Neusner's treatment of Christ could not be more different than that of Dawkins. One of the main differences is that Dawkins is a biologist and Neusner is a scholar of ancient texts and history. Consequently Dawkins' historical and literary understanding is at the eighth grade level, while Neusner brings to his work a depth and sophistication worthy of a man…
jrosenhouse | February 11, 2008It will be a little while yet before I can get back to blogging regularly. But as a way of flexing my atrophying blogging muscles, let me direct your attention to another superlative column from Paul Krugman:
What's particularly saddening is the way many Obama supporters seem happy with the application of “Clinton rules” -- the term a number of observers use for the way pundits and some news organizations treat any action or statement by the Clintons, no matter how innocuous, as proof of evil intent.
The prime example of Clinton rules in the 1990s was the way the press covered Whitewater. A…
jrosenhouse | February 2, 2008Here's a little brainteaser to think about if the Super Bowl ends up being a bit dull. Imagine that you are standing at the baggage carousel at an airport waiting for your bag. A percentage x of the bags from your flight have already appeared on the carousel and yours is not among them. How large does x have to be before there is a probability greater than one half that your bag has been lost by the airline?
Of course, we need to make a few assumptions before we can attempt a proper mathematical analysis of the situation.
First, you can assume that the airline loses two percent of all the…
jrosenhouse | February 1, 2008Via Mark Chu-Carroll I just read this article, from the USA Today, about a mathematician at the University of Pennsylvania who believes that fractions have no place in the elementary and middle school mathematics curriculum:
A few years ago, Dennis DeTurck, an award-winning professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, stood at an outdoor podium on campus and proclaimed, "Down with fractions!"
“Fractions have had their day, being useful for by-hand calculation,” DeTurck said as part of a 60-second lecture series. “But in this digital age, they're as obsolete as Roman numerals…
jrosenhouse | January 28, 2008If you'll forgive another chess post, the annual grandmaster chess tournament in Wijk aan Zee in the Netherlands is now complete. It was the first major tournament of the year, and it had a pleasingly unexpected outcome. Young phenoms Levon Aronian of Armenia and Magnus Carlsen of Norway were the joint winners, with eight points out of thirteen.
For Aronian this was a return to form. His ability to play with the big boys had been established in a number of tournament wins (for example, Wijk aan Zee 2007). Alas, his play had been somewhat shaky since then, but he is plainly back in form…
jrosenhouse | January 28, 2008Go read Paul Krugman's column. Money quote:
First, those who don't want to nominate Hillary Clinton because they don't want to return to the nastiness of the 1990s -- a sizable group, at least in the punditocracy -- are deluding themselves. Any Democrat who makes it to the White House can expect the same treatment: an unending procession of wild charges and fake scandals, dutifully given credence by major media organizations that somehow can't bring themselves to declare the accusations unequivocally false (at least not on Page 1).
Bingo!
jrosenhouse | January 27, 2008Journalism is dead, folks. Start with that. Can you point to a single mainstream media outlet, whether a cable news channel or network news broadcast or newspaper or newsmagazine, that you trust to give you the basic facts about anything? Cable news is now almost wall-to-wall gossip shows, where right-wingers and properly housebroken liberals gather together to explain how the latest statements from the candidates show that the Republicans are courageous truthtellers, while the Democrats are unprincipled wimps. The sole execption, Keith Olbermann, provides some blessed relief, but even he…
jrosenhouse | January 20, 2008ID folks make numerous assertions said to represent scientific challenges to conventional evolutionary theory. These claims are uniformly wrong, which is one of the reasons scientists generally ignore them.
But ID folks also claim that adopting a design perspective could lead to great progress in science, if only scientists would take off their materialist blinders. There is an acid test for all such claims: Go discover something! Writers are fond of saying “Show, don't tell,” and that adage applies very well here. If your perspective is so useful, then prove it by discovering something…
jrosenhouse | January 20, 2008Via The Chess Ninja, I see that Gary Kasparov has commented on the death of Bobby Fischer. I have copied his remarks below the fold.
With the death of Bobby Fischer chess has lost one of its greatest figures. Fischer's status as world champion and celebrity came from a charismatic and combative personality matched with unstoppable play. I recall thrilling to the games of his 1972 Reykjavik world championship match against Boris Spassky when I was nine years old. The American had his share of supporters in the USSR even then, and not only for his chess prowess. His outspokenness and…
jrosenhouse | January 18, 2008Former World Chess Champion Bobby Fischer has died of kidney failure at the age of 64. The New York Times has an informative article here.
For chess fans Bobby Fischer was the classic example of the need to separate the art from the artist. Away from the board Fischer was an emotionally disturbed misfit, entirely unable to take care of himself or deal with the world in a reasonable way. His incoherent, hate-filled rants against Jews and America made him more an object of pity than of anger.
But at the board he's the best there ever was. Only Gary Kasparov is a plausible rival for this…
jrosenhouse | January 15, 2008We are all familiar with optical illusions. These are situations where your eyes misperceive the nature of some image or physical object.
For some time now psychologists and cognitive scientists have been discussing the reality of cognitive illusions. These are situations where people just don't reason properly about some readily described situation. The Monty Hall problem is sometimes described as an example of such an illusion, which, indeed, is why I have been thinking about this recently.
Below the fold is an interesting example drawn from elemenatry logic. I found it in the book…
jrosenhouse | January 15, 2008As reported in this article in Reason Magazine:
My favorite response from any candidate about the evolution/creationism debate was from former Sen. Mike Gravel (Alaska). When LiveScience asked the senator if he thought creationism should be taught in public schools, Gravel replied, “Oh God, no. Oh, Jesus. We thought we had made a big advance with the Scopes monkey trial....My God, evolution is a fact, and if these people are disturbed by being the descendants of monkeys and fishes, they've got a mental problem. We can't afford the psychiatric bill for them. That ends the story as far as I'm…
jrosenhouse | January 12, 2008I just got back from six days in San Diego, participating in the annual Joint Mathematics Meetings. Why “Joint”? Because they are jointly sponsored by the two major American mathematical organizations. I refer, of course, to the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) and the Amercian Mathematical Society (AMS). (No Monty Python jokes, please.)
The Joint Meetings are one of the highlights of the mathematical calendar. It's an enormous affair, with several thousand mathematicians attending. That day in December when the book-length program arrives is an exciting one in my little corner…